The site may not have been in the most appropriate sub section of your forum. However, I do not believe the topic to be off topic for the purposes of your site. Your Terms Of Service permit topics and discussions relating to or of relevance to the Lego community and, also, Castle MOCs. My topic fitted both.

If one uses Lego-type pieces which have been manufactured by another company, and uses them for building or contributing to building a Castle MOC, I don't see how that is that off topic or against the rules of your forum?

I feel that the decision to lock my topic to be unresonable and the reaction to the topic as intolerant and elitist.

My topic is no more off topic than, for example, anything about the customisation of official Lego products using alterations and user-produced products. Your forum allows the latter. Is this not contradictory?

In addition, legal precedent shows that that the Lego Company does not have patent on Lego-type pieces. Thus, the Mega Bloks pieces referred to in my topic, for all intents and purposes, are Lego, in the generic sense, which I feel should be the crux of the matter.

I would appreciate your reconsideration on this matter, please. I am happy to have a dialogue with an official from this forum, whether in this topic, by PM or email.

Your faux-pas is continuing an arguement from a locked thread by starting a new one. You should have sent one of the admins a private message. Now you have opened yourself to public ridicule.

**edit** I should state this. Yes many of us know that there is another option. Megabloks are cheaper, much cheaper and have a lot of really interesting elements but you may find that people really choose lego brand over mega brands because they have found that Megabloks really are an inferior product. Yes, that's personal opinion, but it is widely shared across this hobby.

Trevor

Trust me, I think I'm funnier than you do.Why do I have to add the word "minifig" to my spell checker every time I use it?!

Bad move, Tommy. This is why there is a Private Message system. If you have an issue with something a moderator does, then you should PM an Admin.

Tommyhh wrote:The site may not have been in the most appropriate sub section of your forum. However, I do not believe the topic to be off topic for the purposes of your site. Your Terms Of Service permit topics and discussions relating to or of relevance to the Lego community and, also, Castle MOCs. My topic fitted both.

No, it did not. This is a Lego fan community. We are not a megabloks community. Your thread was not about the Lego fan community.

I feel that the decision to lock my topic to be unresonable and the reaction to the topic as intolerant and elitist.

You are within your rights to feel that way. However, making sure that our rules are followed is not intolerant nor is it elitist.

My topic is no more off topic than, for example, anything about the customisation of official Lego products using alterations and user-produced products. Your forum allows the latter. Is this not contradictory?

It is entirely different. The vast majority of customs are not made with products that compete with Lego itself. Megabloks does. That is that difference.

In addition, legal precedent shows that that the Lego Company does not have patent on Lego-type pieces. Thus, the Mega Bloks pieces referred to in my topic, for all intents and purposes, are Lego, in the generic sense, which I feel should be the crux of the matter.

But Lego has a right to their own name. There is no "generic" Lego. There are companies that compete with Lego.

I would appreciate your reconsideration on this matter, please. I am happy to have a dialogue with an official from this forum, whether in this topic, by PM or email.

If you are willing to discuss this via PM, then why didn't you? Instead you made a public issue of it. Having a thread locked is not an earth-shattering event. You aren't put on some kind of "naughty" list. However, attacking our Mods behavior in a public setting does put you on my list. The thread will stay locked....end of story.

Just to add my two cents to this discussion, and since you made it a public one I'll keep this public, since this is a good note for anyone just joining this or any forum. Tommy, you've made a grand total of 4 posts to this forum, and you're trying to tell everyone here how they should run their hobby and tell the mods and admins how we should run our forum. If you were a contributing member of the community, people might be more receptive to talking about clone brands. But you've basically said that the purpose of your very first post as a member here was to provoke a debate. In your third post you called the members of this forum names, and in your fourth post you called the mods/admins names. As a general rule, that's not a great way to enter a community. We're not saying that people just just kiss up and post 'great MOC!' or whatever, but it's good when entering any group to spend time and get to know people before trying to change the nature of the very group you are entering. It's kind of like this - if my best friend walks in and insults me, I'll laugh and throw an insult back at him. If a total stranger walks in and insults me, I'll be pretty angry at him.

One additional note, it's also not cool to try to go over the heads of mods to admins. Mods and admins should be treated with equal respect. It's not like the mods are some sort of subordinates - they are equally trusted and responsible. The difference between mods and admins is more one of duties - the mods are more involved in the day to day moderation of the forums, while the admins are more involved in creating site content, running contests, dealing with code issues, etc. When there is disagreement among the site administration team, we will discuss it in private, but it is safe to say that you will NEVER see an admin reprimand a mod at the behest of someone who has joined the forum in the past week.